I'll start this column by stating that I support NFL players who choose to kneel during the national anthem. I also support fans who choose to boycott games and team owners who choose to fire those players. That's what America is all about.
But if Colin Kaepernick and his like-minded comrades in the NFL think they're going to find a racially tolerant, multicultural utopia outside the US, they have another thing coming.
The liberal media has framed the issue as a “stand against police brutality,” but that's not what Kaepernick was saying a year ago. In 2016, Kaepernick said his boycott of the national anthem stemmed from general America-hating: "I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color."
Kaepernick has a lot of money. If he hates the United States so much, why doesn't he move?
Answer: because he knows he won't have it better anywhere else on this Earth.
The World Value Survey is a global network of scientists and researchers based in Sweden. They study racial attitudes across the globe, asking people questions like, “Would you mind having neighbors of a different race?” Those who responded that they wouldn’t want to live beside “people of a different race” were deemed racially intolerant.
And which regions are the most racially tolerant on Earth? Scandinavia, Latin America, and the English-speaking countries are by far the most tolerant. In England and its former colonies, including Australia—and yes, America--only 5% of the population objects to having a neighbor of a different race.
Would Colin Kaepernick like to move to a more enlightened and sophisticated country, like France? France is a nation of bigots, where at least 20% of the population balks at having a neighbor of another race. Italy, Germany, Poland, and Spain aren't much better, with at least 10% of all respondents admitting to blatant racism.
And no, leftist politics does not offer protection against racism. Despite communism's promise to eliminate racial and religious hatred through a common struggle against capitalism, racism is rampant in Communist and formerly Communist countries. In Russia and China, at least 15% of the population is blatantly racist. In Cambodia and Vietnam—the sites of long and bloody wars to institute “social equality” through communism—more than 30% of the population is racist. So is socialist, America-hating Venezuela: while neighboring Latin American countries display remarkable tolerance, leftist Venezuela is an outlier in the region, displaying the highest level of prejudice on the entire continent.
I suspect Kaepernick and the leftists writing gushing articles commending him for his “courage” imagine life is better for black people in the Communist paradise of Cuba. Not really.
In Cuba, the Castro ruling class is lily-white, but more than 80 percent of prisoners in Cuban jails are black. Cuban exile Humberto Fontova interviewed a black man, Eusebio Peñalver, who was imprisoned in Castro’s Cuba. He describes his torture thus:
“’N*gger!” taunted my jailers between tortures,' recalled Peñalver (who suffered longer in Castro’s torture chambers than Nelson Mandela in South Africa)… 'We pulled you down from the trees and cut off your tail!' laughed my Castroite torturers. For months I was naked in a 6 x 4 foot cell. That’s four feet high, so you couldn’t stand. But I felt a great freedom inside myself. I refused to commit spiritual suicide,' recalled this heroic man, who the U.S. media completely ignored."
But things are even worse in non-white, non-Christian countries in the Middle East and South Asia. India is arguably the most racist country in the world, with more than half the population saying they would not welcome a neighbor of another race. This is the land where godless people classify other humans into “castes” and label certain human beings “untouchable,” to be killed and disposed of like garbage.
Saudi Arabia, Iran, Jordan, and Egypt round out the list of the globe’s most racist countries. Unlike Christianity, which teaches that all people—Gentile or Jew, servant or free, woman or man—have equal worth, Islam preaches that only people of the correct color, religion, and status in society are worthy of human rights.
No, America is not perfect. But we’re the only country on Earth that fought a war and sacrificed hundreds of thousands of lives to liberate black Americans. The anti-slavery forces were led by Ulysses S. Grant, the son of a frontiersman from my home state of Ohio, who called the cause of slavery “one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”
Every time the NFL players kneel during the national anthem, they thumb their nose at General Grant and those hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers who died to end slavery. America, for all its flaws, is as good as it gets.
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