MDDM background (Counterpunch article)

[Doug Millison]

"Two hundred and twenty six years ago, a newly declared country on this
land fought a war against an occupying colonial power. Using guns,
geography, and a superior military strategy, it struggled against the
arrogance of British power. Underlying the complaints against unjust taxes,
arbitrary authority, and humiliating treatment was a single theme:
democracy. A people cannot be free unless it can determine its own future
through its own political institutions. [...]  Imagine another scenario.
King George III, having successfully defeated the colonists, announces that
perhaps we are entitled to nationhood, but only after we change leadership.
We must have an election in which we choose leadership that the British can
live with, and then perhaps some form of independence can be discussed.
Would we have welcomed this proposal or found it to be a further exercise
of British aggression? [...] So let us turn back to our imagined scenario.
King George, having defeated us militarily, and having laid down his
demands upon us, decides on further policy changes. He divides the land of
American into various regions, and posts sentries at all the roads, where
people have to line up in order to pass from one region to another. At
these checkpoints, the sentries often degrade the colonists:
strip-searching them in front of their families, making them wait
unnecessarily for hours, turning them back arbitrarily. This is not all.
The King sends his soldiers to gut our roads, blow up our public
institutions, commandeer private homes to shelter his soldiers, cut our
water supplies, and parade through what is left of our streets.

And this is not the worst of it. The worst of it is that all the while, he
is sending British citizens, loyal to his policies, to strip of us of our
land and call it their own. He is gradually expropriating the land of
America for British use. The King, of course, does not put it this way
(although perhaps some of his less discreet ministers are not so careful).
He says that he is protecting the British from colonial assault. And the
newspapers and broadsheets across Europe dutifully print his defense as
though it had something to do with the reality of his policies.

What would we have done? Would some of us have attacked the British
settlers who expropriated our land? Would there have been those desperate
enough among us to have taken the battle to British soil, offering our own
lives in order to terrorize the British into leaving? Or would we instead
have said, "Yes, King, you have won and you are right. We will vote for the
leadership you recommend, and will hope that all works out for us in the
end." Is that the spirit we celebrate tonight? [...]

read it all at

http://www.counterpunch.org/may0705.html