I was born in 1949 when racial segregation was still codified in the Deep South and in the Panama Canal Zone, where I spent five years of my childhood in the ‘50s and early ‘60s. I recall vacations my two sisters, my parents and I took from the Canal Zone to the District of Columbia in Washington while my father attended briefings and meetings in the summer as part his work with the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) and as a Captain in the Naval Reserve and noticing the separate drinking fountains and bathrooms in the Smithsonian Institute for “coloreds”, something I never observed in Panama. I only mention this to shed light on how much change has occurred in my lifetime. There were still former slaves living in the U.S. when I was a child.

As a Canal Zone brat, I picked up on how it was the United States of America that built the Panama Canal, and not any of the Latin American nations, which were poorer and more corrupt than the U.S.A.

It wasn’t “white privilege” or “white supremacy” that built the Panama Canal; it was American ingenuity and our ability to conquer yellow fever, malaria, and other mosquito spread tropical diseases. The Canal Zone itself was cleaner, safer and healthier than the Republic of Panama because of who we were as Americans. Americans were not apologetic about building the canal, rather, it was a source of great pride.

In 2020 the Panama Canal is partly operated by Chinese companies, no thanks to former President Jimmy Carter, who had apologized to Panama for creating their country and building the canal and lying to Americans about his intentions with the Canal Zone when he campaigned for the office of President. He betrayed the people who worked for the Panama Canal Company and the men and women who had built the canal and got us nothing positive in return for his actions.

I only make these observations to give the reader some of my background and how I came to see the United States as distinct and superior to most of Latin America. When my family visited Boulder, Colorado or Berkeley, California in those days, I saw a prosperous, freedom loving nation with few of the problems of extreme poverty and corruption that is systemic in the Spanish speaking nations to our south. I was therefore puzzled in later decades as I saw the mainstream media and Democratic Party “celebrate” the “browning of America” and the deliberate opening of our borders to the lower classes of Latin America, the Caribbean, and other non-European parts of the world with the seeming goal of bringing our nation down to the level of the lowest common denominator of Latin American failed states.

In 2020, I see my country at a crossroads that most closely parallels where Rhodesia and South Africa were in the 1970s – being pressured to end white rule and economic dominance with lots of assurances from far-Left “leaders” and “intellectuals” that what will result from handing over power to “people of color” will be a better, more just, safer, and prosperous nation. London and Washington used economic sanctions and shame in order to pressure the Ian Smith government in Rhodesia to hand over power to Robert Mugabe and then used the same pressure techniques to bring about the release of Nelson Mandella from Robin’s Island prison and eventually to get the whites to vote themselves out of power and into what now is a scary, dangerous, militantly anti-white communist state. Rhodesia, once the Jewel of Africa, is now, as Zimbabwe, on par with Haiti economically and politically. South Africa has fared somewhat better, but it is a place that a substantial number of whites no longer feel safe in and find themselves discriminated against in hiring or outright barred from employment by the ANC government. The crime rate there is among the highest in the world. Many, if not most blacks are worse off than they were under white rule.

I believe the United States of America in 2020 is where Rhodesia was in 1970, when Ian Smith declared unilateral independence from Britain in an attempt to maintain white rule while attempting to fight a war against guerrilla soldiers waging a dirty war against white rule modeled after the Khmer Rouge and Vietcong in Southeast Asia and backed by Cuba, the Soviet Union, Red China and North Korea. The difference in the U.S. is that the whites are still in the majority, but are rapidly losing that demographic advantage due to both legal and illegal immigration from non-white Third World countries and a high fertility rate among non-white immigrants. Another similarity is that the mainstream media, academia, and the Democratic Party are encouraging racial animosity against whites in the U.S. and are treating the President of the United States as an illegal occupier of the White House in much the same way that Ian Smith was treated in President’s House in Salisbury, Rhodesia in the ‘70s.

Another historical parallel is when Nelson Mandella was released from prison in South Africa and was being groomed to be the first black president of South Africa. While the intentions sounded nobel, the end result for whites has been disastrous. Rather than bringing about a “rainbow nation” with peace and harmony between the races; whites in South Africa, especially farmers, are in a position similar to that of Jews, Gypsies, communists and homosexuals in Germany in the 1930s. Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

London and Washington betrayed Rhodesian and South African young men who fought on the side of the Allies in World War II by figuratively stabbing them in the back during the Cold War. They are doing the same to the white majority in the rest of the former Free World in 2020. When they’re done pulling down the statues and banning books, they will go after the people who built and look like the statues. Remember the Holodomor. Do not go peacefully into this new Dark Age. The Democrats gave away our Panama Canal and the Canal Zone – Don’t let them give away the United States to the forces of darkness.

S. Byron Gassaway