by Eric Zuesse, Strategic Culture:

The official celebration of America’s victory and Britain’s defeat in the Revolutionary War occurred on 25 November 1783, in Manhattan’s Fraunces Tavern, at the corner of Pearl and Broad Streets. This was reported in Rivington’s New-York Gazette, the following day, and is described in Ray Raphael’s 2009 FOUNDERS: The People Who Brought You a Nation (p. 416). General George Washington was the hero on the occasion, and delivered the speech. It was “13 Toasts” (honoring the thirteen states). Numbers 9-13 asserted the basic values that the new nation was intended by the former colonists to have established in their new nation:

9. May justice support what courage has gained.


10. The vindication of the rights of mankind in every quarter of the globe.


11. May America be an asylum to the persecuted of the earth.


12. May a close union of the states guard the temple they have erected to liberty.


13. May the remembrance of this day be a lesson to princes.

Everyone present was toasting those five goals — goals that were entirely consistent with the 1776 Declaration of Independence, and that may reasonably be considered to reflect the Founders’ vision, just as that Declaration had reflected.

No one can honestly say that today’s America reflects those men’s vision and goals. Perhaps the most blatant way in which today’s America violates these “toasts” is #11: “May America be an asylum to the persecuted of the earth.” Today’s America tells the persecuted to stay out.

On 24 November 2019, the Democratic Party news-site, Huffington Post, headlined “Trump Got His Wall, After All: A small, dedicated crew of hardliners has put up bureaucratic barriers that are far harder to overcome than any hunk of concrete.” Rachel Morris documented there that Trump has succeeded very skillfully in blocking immigration to the US — and not only by the persecuted but by persons who are not:

The restrictionists have already radically scaled back America’s asylum and refugee programs for years to come. But no category of immigrant ( 1 ) has escaped the uptick of denials and delays — not the Palestinian student with a Harvard scholarship who was deported upon landing in Boston, or the Australian business owner forced to leave after building a life here. Not the Bolshoi Ballet stars who somehow failed to meet the criteria of accomplished artists, or the Iraqi translators who risked their lives for the US military and whose annual admissions went from 325 to just two after the change in administration. Then there are the consequences that are harder to capture in headlines or statistics: the couples whose marriages broke down when the foreign spouse was forced to wait far longer than usual in their home country, and the unknown number of people who have abandoned the attempt to stay because of financial hardship or the strain of living with a level of uncertainty that becomes untenable.

“What became clear to me early on was that these guys wanted to shut down every avenue to get into the US,” the first former senior DHS official said. “They wanted to reduce the number of people who could get in under any category: illegals, legals, refugees, asylum seekers — everything. And they wanted to reduce the number of foreigners already here through any means possible.” No government in modern memory has been this dedicated to limiting every form of immigration to the United States. To find one that was, you have to go a long way back, to 1924.

In today’s America, there is a battle between the billionaires, such as Trump, who are visibly racist, versus the billionaires, such as Bezos (who controls the Washington Post), and such as the group of billionaires who control Huffington Post, who aren’t. The latter, the Democratic Party group of billionaires, want to be able to exploit immigrants, not to exclude them. A country that’s run by its billionaires is not a country that’s run by — nor even in accord with — America’s Founders, because they loathed any aristocracy and did their best to prevent any from forming in the US

But #11 wasn’t the only one of the Founders’ toasts that now has become toast. For example, instead of “10. The vindication of the rights of mankind in every quarter of the globe,” we now have had the imposition by the US of dictatorships, and coups and invasions, against — and in order to suppress — democracy, in such instances as Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973, Nicaragua 1985-7, Iraq 2003, Libya 2011, Syria US-, Ukraine 2014, and Yemen 2015-. Today’s US is the Great Dictator, not the Great Emancipator.

And yet, still, Americans believe that this is the nation the American Revolution was fought for. It’s instead actually an extension and restoration of the dictatorship that those men had waged war against and defeated (though we now can see that this was only a temporary victory). The America that they founded ended on 26 July 1945, when the Deep State finally took control. And, of course, they control the publishers and the rest of the media, so that the American people are blocked from knowing this fact. But, fortunately, you’re now reading a site that isn’t controlled by America’s billionaires; so, you know it, despite the billionaires’ constant effort to hide it from you and to fool you into believing the myth.

America’s Founders were great figures of history, but today’s America is inimical to everything they fought for. Today’s America is what they had fought against.

Read More @ Strategic-Culture.org