HelterSkeleter -
1. I'm still waiting for that list of people who went to prison in the United States merely because of their opinion about history and for merely expressing it. You will not find one. If you had one, you'd mention it.
One and precisely one man went to prison under the provision of the Smith Act because of his membership in the Communist party, one man sentenced because of its prohibition against membership in an organization that planned the violent overthrow of the United States government. (Other American communists were convicted of conspiracy to violently overthrow the government, but one and only one was sent to prison for membership in an organization devoted to that end. He was pardoned on Christmas 1962.) The Europeans and Canadians convict and imprison men for writing books and giving speeches that differ with the Established History as taught by the state. You are definitely smart enough to see that difference. The Smith Act was upheld by a 5-4 split decision of the United States Supreme Court. My opinion is that the majority got it wrong. The did so a short time after Nikita Khrushchev pounded his shoe on a table at the UN and pledged, "we will bury you", a relatively short time after Warsaw Pact forces invaded Hungary, betrayed a promise of safe passage for and took the Patriot Hungarian Imre Nagy to Romania where, in a secret trial, he was convicted of anti-socialist misdeeds, and was slowly strangled to death with no drop. (Yes, I've visited his grave.) An era in which soviet nuclear weapons - developed with technology stolen from our nuclear program by American communist Julius Eisenberg and others - were mounted on rockets aimed at, among other things, Capitol Hill.
2. Americans have had through most of their history a policy of neutrality, attributable to certain wisdom expressed by George Washington in his Farewell Address. That explains why it was hard for Wilson to involve us in WWI and why the American people would never have accepted participation in another European war without direct provocation. We declared war on Japan on December 8, 1941. Germany complied with its treaty obligations with Japan and then declared war on the US. On December 11, we declared war on Germany. There had been a defacto state of hostilities between the US and Germany all during 1941. We had closed its consulates, frozen its assets here, seized one of its ships on the high seas and taken it to port, and fired on another German vessel.
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v08/v08p389_Hitler.html The role of the US policeman of the world seems to have started there, a role many both outside and inside the United States do not find agreeable. Our purpose in Europe in World War II was noble, cost many lives, and was largely fought thousands of miles from our shores.
3. The subject of US economic support for the UK in Britain is complex. Before the war broke out we sold fifty destroyers to Britain and obtained some bases. I don't think that in Berlin, it looked like we were sitting this out in neutrality. After the war, we lent the UK 8 Billion, which in current money is 56 Billion. Two percent interest. The UK seems to have had the right to suspend payments, which they did in 1956, 1957, 1964, 1965, 1968 and 1976. 656 (nearly ten percent) was written off by the US. So, it was paid in Pounds Sterling considerably lesser in value than at the time the loans were extended. It looks to me that the UK did pretty well in the end. Additionally, the Lend Lease materials remaining in the UK after the war were discounted to a value of ten percent on the dollar. All of this kept the UK afloat and from where I sit, it looks to be an act of remarkable generosity and charity. Two percent? Fifty years to pay? The right to suspend payments when it was tough on their economy? Discount to ten percent? Where you find injustice in all of this, or how it relates to free speech is beyond me. I guess you think that the US should have borne all of the economic costs of defeating Hitler alone. I can't imagine anything unfair or unreasonable about requiring England to pay at least a small portion of the costs of its own defense, and that's what they did in the end. American casualties were 418,000 in that war.
4. No, slavery was not unconstitutional until the passage of the XIII Amendment and was expressly taken into account in the Constitution after long debate about whether slaves should be counted in congressional apportionment. Many of those slaves were sold to us as colonists during the roughly one hundred and fifty years before the Brits abolished the slave trade in 1807. England sold us many of those slaves. They didn't get around to abolishing slavery in all ends of their empire until 1843. Your error is applying contemporary values to times when people did not share them. Values do change, the history of slavery is ancient, and it did not go down without a fight.
5. You need to check your facts about religious liberty in England - and about cruel and unusual punishment. In 1789, England was still burning women. Our Bill of Rights addresses the sadism of English justice in the Eighth Amendment. The last priest was murdered by the British state on account of his faith in 1681, but it was not lawful for any catholic to sit in Parliament until 1828. Our prohibition on religious tests beat that by thirty years, though anti-catholicism was as rampant here as it was in the mother country. Until 1846 Jews in the UK had to wear a distinctive Jew Uniform. England, long before Hitler, expelled its Jews in 1290. After that, Jews in England had to go underground. They briefly had civil rights for a short time in 1759. It's disputed when they first acquired to sit in Parliament, but it's dated to 1829 or 1858. Say whatever you want to compare British liberty to our in the US, but we've never expelled the Jews and we've never required them to go around in Hebraic Costume. And, yes, England did hang, castrate, draw entrails, and finally dissect Catholic priest until at least 1681.
6. The whole point of our revolution was that 1. England was denying the colonists their fundamental rights as they existed in the traditions of English law and 2. in the minds of many, those rights did not go far enough to protect the individual. English abuse inspired the Framers.
7. No, the constitution did not prevent any lynchings. No document can control a mob, and anyone who thinks that a law or constitution can stop lynchings has not thought the issue through.
8. The Fourteenth Amendment is, of course, silent about schools and buses. It talks about the equal protection of the law. And for a very long time, Amendment was interpreted to require just what it says, equality of treatment, no more no less, and racial segregation was permitted. I'm unaware of any laws that said that Black people would be denied a right to a free and compulsory education (and people like Justice Thurgood Marshal and other quite accomplished Black figures were the product of segregated schools) or denied an equal right to sit on a bus. The issue is whether equality of opportunity can practically exist when segregation exists. That issue was not put to a popular vote. Our Supreme Court, in 1954, determined that the very fact of segregation was likely to psychologically convince Black people that they were inferior, and that circumstance resulted in an insoluble problem of equal protection that might only be resolved by the abolition of segregation. Whether they were correct as a matter of fact is no longer relevant, this principle is now firmly established in US law, but their conclusion could hardly be considered an obvious or uncontroversial truth at the time, and many smart and sincere people rejected it.
People came here for a reason, and while that reason was often economic, it was intermixed with a desire to breathe free air. Ask any Iraqi or Palestinian Christian or any Russian Jew why he or she came here. We continue to inspire the world, because, afflicted as we are with problems, we still offer freedom and opportunity on a scale that's rare in the world. There will be hundreds of thousands going to sleep around the world tonight wishing that they'd been born in the United States; I am damn proud of the United States and how it's changed the world for the better. I am proud of the relief it offers to the victims of tragedy all around the world, about the support it gives to freedom and against repression. There are clearly policies and actions and parts of history that shame me - Guantanamo is one of them - and Abu Grab is another - and moral censorship is another - and drug laws are another - but in balance, in a world where no human institution can ever be more perfect that we humongously imperfect human beings who created it, it is a glorious and inspiring nation. When this nation was involved in bloody combat in the jungles of southeast Asia in 1972 to extend liberty against those who would force state atheism on helpless people, I raised my right hand and swore an oath that put my life in hands of the United States, to be used in its discretion. Between that and other similar subsequent oaths, I surrendered my own freedom of choice for 11 years for the purpose of defending this nation and the principles upon which it was built. I would do that again in a heartbeat, despite my strong opposition to the purposes for which the military is being used around the world tonight.
I'm now done responding to all of this because it's come far afield of what I'm interested in, and that's the growth of Liberty.