o the Forum:Commenting on the reconciliation meeting of federal officials and Hawaiians, Walter Lewis states: “… another impasse developed when a member of the audience asked if the state had political power in Hawai’i and if so where did the
o the Forum:Commenting on the reconciliation meeting of federal officials
and Hawaiians, Walter Lewis states: “… another impasse developed when a
member of the audience asked if the state had political power in Hawai’i and if
so where did the state purchase Hawai’i from.”
In his letter (“Akaka Was
Wrong”—TGI 12-19-99) Lewis answered by stating that the question is “absurd as
States are formed under Article IV of the constitution …”
The question is
not absurd, and citing Article IV of the U.S. Constitution is to dabble in
legal niceties but fails to provide people with a truthful answer.
Mr.
Lewis should remember that the Founding Fathers who wrote Article IV came from
a culture and people who forcibly displaced dozens upon dozens of Atlantic
Seaboard Indian tribes.
History shows that all States, whether commercial
or feudal, invariably originated in conquest and confiscation. No State
originated in any other way. Even the Kamehameha Monarchy was no exception to
the rule.
The truthful answer to the question of where the State of Hawai’i
purchased these islands is that it did not purchase these islands. The State’s
originators stole these islands from the Kamehameha dynasty.
The Kamehameha
cabal, in turn, stole Hawai’i from poorly organized island people by using the
force of clubs and muskets and winning a brutal battle at the Pali on
O’ahu.
Not until the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor was so much blood
shed in Hawai’i.
No grownup should take seriously Daniel Akaka’s
1993 Apology Resolution. America’s power and truth does not reside in its paper
resolutions and its laws. The real law is carried on the belts of most
cops.
The people who run the USA learned well a lesson taught by Septimius
Severus, the Roman emperor. On his deathbed in Britannia the emperor said to
his successors: “Stick together, pay the soldiers, and don’t worry about
anything else.”
In the 1960s, Mexican-American students protested the
taking of the Southwest from Mexico. The semanticist and man chosen to bring
order to the unruly San Francisco State University campus, Dr. Hayakawa,
responded to the Mexican-American students. Hayakawa said: “The United States
stole the Southwest fair and square.”
The same goes for
Hawai’i.
Douglas E. Rapozo
Kapa’a
