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From The Publisher

PublisherFrom The Publisher

One of the United States Congressional leaders in the investigation into the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D. C., is a Republican named Liz Cheney, a congresswoman from Wyoming.  

    I wasn’t sure whether she was a senator or a congresswoman, so I went into the computer. At the time, it was branded in my mind that she was the daughter of a United States fighter pilot who was shot down over North Vietnam during the Vietnam War and served four or five courageous years in a Hanoi prison cell. But that pilot was John McCain, who later became a senator for Arizona and a Republican Party candidate for U.S. president when Barack Obama first won for the Democrats in 2008. 

    There would have been a lot of egg on my face if I hadn’t checked the computer. This is the type of thing which happens to you as you age. 

    There was, however, a certain amount of accuracy in my original thinking, in that Liz Cheney is the daughter of a former Republican vice-president, Dick Cheney, who was considered one of the hawks in the United States war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq which began under false pretenses in 2003.

    In becoming one of the leaders of the attack on Donald Trump, who most people consider the most powerful politician in the Republican Party, Liz Cheney is demonstrating an amount of courage which should be respected, and praised. 

    The reason I had confused Liz Cheney with a daughter of John McCain is because Donald Trump, who dodged the Vietnam War draft on flimsy medical excuses, had publicly insulted John McCain, an authentic war hero, before he died of cancer a couple years ago. The McCain family was, of course, much hurt by the insult to their patriarch. 

    The socio-political climate in the United States is very confrontational, for several reasons. But racism factors greatly into the cauldron-like American atmosphere. 

    European immigrants, whose descendants form the white American population majority, waged war against the Native American population of America to seize the eastern and middle-western territory of the United States. Then they moved further west and down south. When the white Americans began moving south, they grabbed huge areas of land, all the way from Texas to California, from the Mexican people, who had outlawed slavery during the presidency of Vicente Guerrero, who was black, in the late 1820s.

    Today, the American empire is being threatened by drugs, hedonism, and immigration by people of color. Remember, this was a republic which fought a bloody civil war over slavery between 1861 and 1865. The whole world can see that white Americans love high-powered guns and they are inclined to violence as a solution to problems. Hence, January 6, 2021.

    I have said earlier that Donald Trump is the most powerful leader in the Republican Party. Belizeans have had enough experience with party politics as an institution to know that Liz Cheney may have committed political suicide by opposing Donald Trump.

    I never studied United States history, and all I know of American  politics is what I see on cable television. But I am convinced that if the Biden presidency ever moves to indict and incarcerate Trump, the U.S. will break out into some kind of civil war. This is real.

    In Belize, we have benefited greatly, since the end of the American Civil War, from our proximity to the United States, the fact that we are English-speaking, and the fact that Belize and the United States basically share Christian beliefs. But today, the crisis in America grows. There is more and more evidence that Trump used violence in an attempt to overthrow Joe Biden’s victory in the November 2020 presidential election. This is what January 6, 2021 clearly constituted—seditious conspiracy. Real seditious conspiracy, not a brief newspaper article.

    Remember this, Belizeans. Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to let you in. (The words of Robert Frost.) You saw what has been happening to the Ukrainians. They have no home to go to.   

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