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“Ua mau ke ea o ka ʻāina i ka pono“

is a Hawaiian phrase meaning: “The life (sovereignty) of the land is perpetuated in (by) righteousness,” and is the state motto of Hawaiʻi. The motto was adopted by the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi in 1843…. source

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From: Democracy Now

Author Stephen Kinzer discusses his new book, “Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq.” In it, he writes that the invasion of Iraq “was the culmination of a 110-year period during which Americans overthrew fourteen governments that displeased them for various ideological, political, and economic reasons.”…

AMY GOODMAN: Stephen Kinzer, I want to begin where you do in the book, and that is, with Hawaii.

STEPHEN KINZER: Many Americans I don’t think realize that Hawaii was an independent country before it was brought into the United States. In brief, this is the story. In the early part of the 19th century, several hundred American missionaries, most of them from New England, sailed off to what were then called the Sandwich Islands to devote their lives to, as they would have put it, raising up the heathen savages and teaching them the blessings of Christian civilization.

It wasn’t long before many of these missionaries and their sons began to realize that there was a lot of money to be made in Hawaii. The natives had been growing sugar for a long time, but they had never refined it and had never exported it. By dispossessing the natives of most of their land, a group that came from what was then called this missionary planter elite sort of left the path of God, went onto the path of Mammon and established a series of giant sugar plantations in Hawaii, and they became very rich from exporting sugar into the United States.

In the early 1890s, the U.S. passed a tariff that made it impossible for the Hawaiian sugar growers to sell their sugar in the U.S. So they were in a panic. They were about to lose their fortunes. And they asked themselves what they could do to somehow continue to sell their sugar in the U.S.

They came up with a perfect answer: We’ll get into the U.S. How will we do this? Well, the leader of the Hawaiian revolutionaries, if you want to call them that, who were mostly of American origin, actually went to Washington. He met with the Secretary of the Navy. He presented his case directly to the President of the United States, Benjamin Harrison. And he received assurances that the U.S. would support a rebellion against the Hawaiian monarchy. …

This revolution was carried out with amazing ease. The leader of the Hawaiian revolutionaries, this missionary planter elite, simply announced at a meeting one day, “We have overthrown the government of Hawaii, and we are now the new government.” And before the queen was able to respond, the U.S. ambassador had 250 Marines called to shore from the ship that was conveniently off the coast of Honolulu and announced that since there had been some instability and there seemed to be a change of government, the Marines were going to land to protect the new regime and the lives and property of all Hawaiians. So that meant that there was nothing the queen could do. The regime was immediately recognized by the United States, and with that simple process, the monarchy of Hawaii came to an end, and then ultimately Hawaii joined the U.S.

Listen, Read, Watch Part I of the Rest of the Story

Part II of Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

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