America - Imagine a world without her - by Dinesh D'Sousa cliffnotes

America – Imagine a world without Her

Indictments against America:

1. Theft of Land- additional crimes
2. Genocide.  Victim, Native Americans
3. Theft of Mexican Territory.  Victim, Mexico
4. Theft of Labor – Further Crime, Segregation and Racism.  Victim- African Americans
5. Theft of Resources.  Victim, the World
6. Theft of the American Dream.  Victim, the American People

1.

 Howard Zinn – People’s History of the United States, the New Story of American Shame

Declaration of Independence – a cry against injustice, liberty is the solution.  We ARE a nation of immigrants and settlers.

Ward Churchill – Anti-American.  Said he’d drop bomb on America.

Barack Obama, says he’s going to remake America. 

Detroit was once the richest city in the world.  Look at it now.

Is the story of American Shame true or not?

• Howard Zinn: A true historian?  No. 
• Professor Ron Radosh is a  leading scholar of American Radicalism.
• Says Howard is not a historian, but rather he was trying to inspire young people to revolt against America.
• Zinn claims that America is the single most oppressive Nation in the world.
• Wants us to join him in creating a new social revolutionary movement.

Is there a more reliable source to the history of America?

• Alexis de Tocqueville- a French aristocrat who traveled through America in 1831 wrote the classic book, “Democracy in America”. 
• He found Americans to be enterprising, adventurous, and above all, innovators.
• No American bows before another.  It’s the only place in the world where they call the waiter, “Sir”, as he were a knight.
• Saw the importance of Christianity in inner life, also in political life.
• Religion must be regarded as the first of their Political Institutions.
• When a citizen undertakes an endeavor, he does it himself or in collaboration with others, not by soliciting its government.
• Alexis stood on the border of Ohio and Kentucky.  Ohio, industrious.  Kentucky, Idle, yet, the soil was just as fertile in both.
• Saw that slavery doesn’t work.  Why?  No incentive for the slaves and causes laziness in the slave owners because they let others do all their work for them.
• He knew this was not a thing unique to America.

2.

Most countries are founded on conquest.  Conquest is how wealth was acquired, not through entrepreneurship, invention, or business.

• Historically, every culture has despised entrepreneurs and merchants.
• India has a Caste system: priests, warriors, merchants and landowners, servants and subordinates.
• Islamic historian Ibn Khaldun says looting is morally preferable to entrepreneurship or trade.  Why?  Looting is more manly.
• In America, wealth wealth is created through innovation, entrepreneurship, and trade.

Manhattan in 1626 was sold by Native Americans to the Dutch for 700 bucks.

• It is the creation of the people who built it, not the original inhabitants who sold it.

Did Americans steal the land from the Native Americans?

• Columbus never landed in North America.
• Actions of the Spanish was 150 years before North America.
• Zinn Blames America for the sins of the Spanish, Portuguese, Great Britain, and France.
• What about broken treaties since 1776?  Sioux in Black Hills were offered $1 Billion, but refused it, they want the land.
• But is it their land?
• In the late 1700s, the Sioux took the land from the Cheyenne, who had earlier pushed out the Kiowa and the Arapahoe.
• What about Genocide? From 1492 to 1692, in the two centuries after Columbus, the Native American population declined by 80% due to diseases- measles, typhus, smallpox, cholera and malaria as there were no immunities.
• Just a century and a half earlier, 1/3 of the Europe was wiped out by bubonic and pneumonic plagues, from Asia.  Did Zinn shame the Asians as committing genocide?  No.  I didn’t think so.
• If the Native Americans wanted to, they could return to that way of life.  Instead, they have chosen tribal self-government, building resorts and casinos, and other entrepreneurial business.

3.

Theft of Mexican Territory?  Did we steal ½ of Mexico in the Mexican War?

·        Ted Cruz- there were Texians in that area.  General Santa Ana was a dictator in Mexico.  He began stripping rights from the Texians.  They began to revolt to protect their freedom and independence.  They fought a revolution and they won.

·        A border war ensued, the American Government got involved and we took all of mexico, the whole country, including Mexico City.  Then we retired its debt and gave ½ of the country back to them.

·        The people on the American side of the border were made American Citizens.

·        The word Mexican is an adjective, the word American is a noun.  Temo Muniz is a law student active in Hispanic politics.  He’s an American with Mexican heritage.  He loves the American Dream.  Would he move down from Texas to Mexico?  No.  Why?  Because the cartels would destroy his dream.  If somehow Mexico re-obtained that land, he’d move to Minnesota.

·        Border Patrol was asked how many folks are sneaking from America down to Mexico.  None. 

·        What if America had kept all of Mexico?  What would it be like now?

4.

Theft of Labor:

Lincoln headed up what the Democrats called the Black Republican Party.

• Declaration of Independence means “men were created equal… in certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
• Lincoln knew that the Founding Fathers could not have outlawed slavery and still had a Union.  No southern state would have joined such a union and slavery would have lasted much longer.
• Fredrick Douglas once called Lincoln the White Man’s President.  There was a movement by many blacks and at one time Lincoln to consider relocating blacks to Africa, but meeting Lincoln restored his faith in America
• Douglas didn’t want to leave nor destroy America.  He wanted to participate in America.
• For the 1^st time in history, a Great War was fought to end slavery.
• 300,000 Northern soldiers died.

The Civil Rights Movement was not a break with the American founding.  The principles were already set down in the Declaration of Independence.

·        The principles were already set down in the Declaration of Independence.

·        “The topic of race more than any other generates taboos.  Taboos are the enemy of history and truth.”

·        White Indentured Servants- Starting in 1618, children captured from the streets of London were sold into colonial America.

·        Over the next 150 years, 150,000 Irishmen women and children were declared soldiers of war and sold as Indentured Servants in Virginia and New England.

·        Indentured Servitude usually lasted 7 years, but some were extended or died there.  They worked side by side with Black slaves, and at one time, outnumbered them.

William Ellision owned 1000 acres and 60 slaves.  He was perhaps once a slave himself.  He practiced slave breeding, a practice very frowned upon even at that time.

• Henry Louis Gates and other scholars estimate that, in a period before the Civil War, there were approximately 3,500 free African-Americans who owned more than 10,000 Black slaves.
• In South Carolina, about the same percentage of black as whites owned slaves.
• Slavery existed all over the world.  Egyptians, Chinese, Africans, American Indians all had slaves, long before Columbus came into the scene.
• Tragically, slavery continues today.
• That French aristocrat, Alexis de Tocqueville, made mention as to why slavery just doesn’t work.  For one thing, there’s no incentive in it for the Black slave.  Why should they want to produce for another under such horrid conditions?  For another, it doesn’t come even close to benefiting the slave owner either.  It makes them lazy, among other things.  It just doesn’t work.

What is uniquely Western is the Abolition of slavery.  What’s uniquely American is the fighting of a Great War to end it.

Madame Walker and her daughter Lelia- aka Sarah Breedlove…

• Sold hair care products door to door.
• She became the first self-made female millionaire in America.
• Why isn’t she in the history books?  Why isn’t Michael Moore and Elizabeth Warren talking about her?
• Why doesn’t Matt Damon talking about her?  Heah Chowd?  How bout’ dim apples? 
• Martin Luther King once said, “Every man must write with his own hand the charter of his Emancipation Proclamation.  We are all in this country a minority of one and how we succeed or fail depends on our efforts.”

5.

Theft of Resources

Did America get rich by stealing from other countries?  Since the Vietnam War, we were charged with America the Imperialist.

• Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s spiritual advisor, “Not God bless America, God damn America.”
• Bill Ayers – founder of the Weather Underground- He bombed the Pentagon.  He’s now a college professor.
• John Fer: pilot in the Air Force- Plane was shot down, he was captured and interrogated.  He went to Vietnam to “try and help South Vietnam stand on their own two feet.”  POW for 6 years, he came home to a different America.
• In Iraq, we spent a lot of money, then turned over the oil fields to Iraquis.  They attempted to burn it all down anyway, iirc.
• In Afghanistan, after 9-11, even while bombing terrorist targets, we were delivering food rations to Afghan civilians.
• American rebuilt Japan and Germany.
• We are NOT the bad guys of the world.

Colin Powell – “The only land that America asks for abroad is land to bury our dead.”

6.

Theft of the American Dream

Capitalism- Does it rip off the consumer?

• Burger Joints.  How much does that burger cost you?  How much does it cost you to make it?  At home?  How about your labor and time put into it?
• Steve Jobs- the I-phone.  His products changed the world.
• “Capitalism works not through coercion or conquest, but through the consent of the consumer.
• Matt Damon puts in 6 weeks of work to earn several million dollars.  “How does he make the money?  The consumers who buy tickets to his movies.  In other words, you.”

Elizabeth Warren:

• “You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for.” 
• “You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate.”
• Entrepreneurs and business owners do use public services.  But so does everybody else.
• Let’s say a business owner makes 4x as much as the employees.  They pay up to 4x as much taxes... or double or whatever.  Or none like Trump haha!  Does she get to drive 4x as fast on the highway?  Will the fire dept. arrive 4x as fast?

What about the Rest of the World?

• The world is embracing the Free Market.
• Jagdish Bhagwati- professor of economics at Columbia University- researcher of Global Capitalism… In less than 15 years, 200 million people in India have pulled out of poverty.  In China, 400-500 Million people have done the same, more because they started earlier.

“Capitalism is the most important moral case.”

• “The people opposing it are the ones who really undermine the fortunes of the poor.”  Democrats.

Charity – Aurthur Brooks… Income redistribution?

• The folks of the religious conservative side give away the most, about 4x as much as people who are on the secular left.
• Star Parker- believed the poor were poor because the wealthy were wealthy.  She was on welfare, heard the gospel, had some close friends stick their fingers in her face and said, “Your lifestyle is unacceptable to God.”  She went back to college, got a degree, started a business, runs an organization today, now helps herself and many, many others.  Oh, and I’d bet she feels pretty good about things today as well.  Now that’s your Republican.
• America’s wealth is not stolen.  It’s created.

U2’s Bono: Thinks it’s not a “Right/Left issue, but a Right/Wrong issue.”  He said, “America is an Idea, isn’t it?  Ireland is a great country, but it’s not an idea.”

Saul Alinsky, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s dreamiest mentor… wants the Haves to feel guilty and the Have-Nots to feel resentful.