Letter to the editor: Americans' 'tyranny and oppression'

The July 5 print edition’s front-page centerpiece featured an article with the headline “American resolve.” The subhead referred to the “determination of colonists,” and the article itself quoted the Hanna’s Town Resolves document, which cited the British “system of tyranny and oppression” and declared that all Americans needed to “resist and oppose” such a system.

By the time I finished reading the article, I’d learned that the Hanna’s Town Resolves document came as a response to the initial battles of the Revolutionary War, with the document serving as a warning to the British Empire that colonial Americans would not yield without a struggle. Yet, even as I read the piece, I couldn’t help but think that those same Americans soon would employ their own “system of tyranny and oppression” as they spread out across the continent and birthed the U.S. empire by seizing the lands of the original inhabitants while denying them their own independence.

Further, those indigenous peoples who chose to “resist and oppose” such a system encountered an American imperialist juggernaut that embraced and continued the European colonizers’ centuries-long genocidal crusade against native tribes. The U.S. empire, of course, relied on that same “American resolve” and the “determination” of its citizens, even as it went on championing those famous words from the Declaration of Independence: “all men are created equal.”

John David Kudrick

Penn Township, Westmoreland County