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by Ryan Amptmeyer

In 1893, the legitimate monarchy of Hawaii was illegally overthrown in an effort to placate the gluttonous demands of corporate sugar barons. The American press tried to justify the coup with the racist argument that Native Hawaiians could not govern themselves. Never mind the countless centuries of evidence to the contrary.

In 1993, the U.S. Senate formally apologized for this atrocity. But Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash., dissented, realizing that the logical consequence of the apology would be independence.

In 1994, Native Hawaiians declared independence and wrote their own constitution. Now Hawaiian sovereignty activist Dennis "Bumpy" Kanahele is in prison. He explicitly calls for a peaceful and gradual transition to home rule.

Furthermore, he rules out the expulsion of Asian and European populations as antithetical to the Hawaiian tradition of "aloha."

The chauvinist hypocrisy of the capitalist media has never been more blatant. The Wall Street propaganda machine is mollycoddling white power terrorists Timothy McVeigh and Randy Weaver, while turning a deaf ear to peace-loving activists like Kanahele.

Kanahele was arrested in August on trumped-up charges of harboring a tax resister. A federal magistrate denied him bail, calling him a danger to the community. Federal cops have repeatedly tried to portray the Hawaiian pacifist as violent, to no avail.

Government repression of indigenous activists is nothing new. Three Puerto Rican Nationalists have been illegally kept in solitary confinement since the 1970s. When Lakota Sioux agitator Leonard Peltier declared that all political boundaries from Alaska to Cape Horn are meaningless, he was charged with treason. When President Clinton said the same thing, it was called NAFTA.

Defending Kanahele is in the interest of U.S. workers because occupied Hawaii serves America's racist rulers as a stepping stone for genocidal imperialist adventures in East Asia. These invasions result in sweatshop colonies, like the puppet regime in Korea, which drive down our wages.

It's time to end the Vasco de Gama era. Let's get the U.S. and France out of Polynesia and padlock the Pentagon.

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Ryan Amptmeyer (amptmeye@sage.cc.purdue.edu) of Lafayette is a hard-core trade unionist working for the State of Indiana.

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