• Submitted by: manso
• Editorial Articles
• 10 / 22 / 2010

---

October 21. Question: Who said the following?:

The day is not far distant when three Stars and Stripes at three equidistant points will mark our territory: one at the North Pole, another at the Panama Canal, and the third at the South Pole. The whole hemisphere will be ours in fact as, by virtue of our superiority of race, it already is ours morally.

Answer: President William Howard Taft, in 1912.

All of Western and Northern Europe --not counting Russia-- fits easily into Canada. President Taft envisioned U.S. sovereignty over Canada, plus Alaska and the Lower 48, Mexico, and all points south from there to Antarctica, including the Caribbean islands. Even blitzkrieg would have taken a long time to reach the capitals of Chile and Argentina, crossing

the Andes or the Amazon on the way. Taft anticipated nothing less than the consolidation of the largest contiguous empire known in history, and by a date not far distant.

The president echoed the writings in an earlier century of columnist John L.O'Sullivan, who, in 1839, found a "divine destiny" for the US "to establish on earth the moral dignity and salvation of man." The author edited and wrote for the United States Magazine and Democratic Review, or Democratic Review, for short. He urged the expansion into Cuba of slavery, considering that practice so uplifting that Afro-descendants in the US, in gratitude, should build a monument to the first slave trader.

By 1845, O'Sullivan was pressing for the annexation of Texas, asserting that it was "our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions." Not satisfied with the Texas project, the same year O'Sullivan declared the right of the US to claim the whole of Oregon. He explained: And that claim is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.By 1912, Taft had reason to be maniacally upbeat.

Just a few decades after O'Sullivan's metaphysical discoveries, the US had taken half of Mexico by war, expanding its frontiers to the Pacific Ocean. It held a new possession, the Hawaiian Islands, and, as spoils of war, the Phillipines, Guam, and Puerto Rico. It had relinquished Cuba, but under a constitution that recognized the right of the US to intervene there at will, and with a perpetual lease on Guantanamo Bay for a naval base. Having pried off Panama from Colombia, it would soon complete the Panama Canal, gaining control over the sole inter-oceanic passage at the center of the continent.

Taft surely felt the winds of Providence under his wings as he claimed the right to own the continent.

World War I and the Russian Revolution put Manifest Destiny on hold for a while,but, in the aftermath of World War II, the pacification of Central and South America through allied military dictatorships, and the collapse of the USSR, the concept was born again in a new form. This time, there was no reference to a superior race; unification was to be pursued through agreements of a commercial and political character, taking as a starting point the Washington Consensus.

In 1992, Francis Fukuyama published The End of History and the Last Man. Two years later, President William Clinton announced the signing of the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which was immediately followed by the proposal for a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), that area being defined as the entire continent except for Cuba.

The FTAA did not happen; not everyone on the continent was willing to be assimilated into the zone of promised prosperity. The concept, however, lives on through the DR-CAFTA (Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement) and bilateral agreements.

Republicans, like Taft and former president Bush, and Democrats, like O'Sulivan,Clinton and current President Barack Obama, are bitterly divided these days. They agree, however, that the future of the Americas lies in a continent-wide area of neoliberal economics, from the North Pole to the South Pole; and that the area must be led by the US and protected by the defensive capabilities of its many military bases already located in the region.

Source: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/message/118605