The “Land of the Free” Has Been the Enemy of Freedom Around the World | Truthout
Today, streets and lawns throughout the United States bristle with red, white and blue, and a settler colony built on genocide and slavery seeks to depict itself as a scrappy young underdog that overthrew the yokes of British tyranny. Yet for hundreds of millions around the world, the stars and stripes have been a symbol not of independence but of coercion, oppression and forced dependence.
From Latin America to Southeast Asia, and from the Middle East and North Africa to Eastern Europe to sub-Saharan Africa, the “land of the free” has often been an enemy of self-determination. No people — including this country’s native inhabitants — have been safe from the reach of U.S. empire, which insisted on making the world an ungated playground for its interests.
I am Palestinian. For 76 long years, the U.S. – the nation of my birth – has materially and militarily backed a state that displaced my grandparents from their home in 1948 and rendered them and their children stateless — a nation that has been cleansing my people from their land since its founding, and in its latest act of genocide, has cut short the lives of 37,953 Palestinians within the last nine months alone.