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Saturday, September 8, 2007

GENOCIDE BY THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Genocide

I was wearing my t-shirt from the April 30th, 2006 Save Darfur rally in Washington, D.C. Thursday that reads "INSTEAD OF MOURNING A GENOCIDE, STOP ONE. This t-shirt gets a lot of attention. One woman read it at the Whole Foods Grocer and said to me, but "how do we stop it?" In the Indianapolis airport, someone asked me if they could call me and talk to me about it. And Thursday, my yard man asked me "What is genocide?" And so I told him. A lot of people really don't know what "GENOCIDE" is, but for varioius reasons they don't inquire. He did. Good for him. I told him about the Providence, Rhode Island "Dream for Darfur" event that I am organizing and about China's link to the genocide in Darfur, Sudan. Then he said to me "No wonder Phil had a crush on you." Phil was his boss until Phil died in his sleep at age 47 a few weeks ago.

Genocide is something that a lot of people really don't want to know about. Because if they educated themselves about it, they would find it uncomfortable if not hypocritical NOT TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. Genocide is when a group of people is targeted to eliminate. It can be by torture, killing, maiming, raping, starving them to death, robbing them of their land, demanding they lose their culture, beliefs and social structure, stripping them of their dignity, stealing their livestock, burning down their villages, etc. It has been going on repeatedly in country after country. It is going on in Darfur, Sudan, and filtering over into Chad. And the Democratic Republic of Congo has had the effects of genocide and the treatment just like genocide for years. The Rwandan genocidaires went to the Demcratic Republic of Congo to escape getting caught after the 100 day 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

In the United States of America, we too perpetrated genocide within our own boundaries. The targeted groups were the people who lived on this land prior to the European invasion and hostile take over of the land here. Our government has never acknowledged that the institutionalized treatment of the Native Americans was genocide. But it was. And this country will never be one based on values until it formally acknowledges what it did to the Native peoples.
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Navajo history given by : Edgewateraz
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Cultural Genocide
By anahuacwarrior

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2959.html
The Indian Removal Act
1814 - 1858


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