First of all, anyone who still celebrates the 4th of July is either, 1) a hypocrite, 2) an Orwellian mind-control slave, or 3) lost in a maze of wishful thinking.
See, that thing that everyone calls, or rather called America is dead. It died back around Kent State or so, though really it started dying about the time the Constitution's ink was drying. Thomas Jefferson himself hauled off and bought the Louisiana territories, though for the life of me I can't find the power to do so anywhere in that document.
Abraham Lincoln put a stake in the heart of that thing called America when he issued General Order 100, suspended Habeas Corpus and muzzled the press.
The last tattered shreds of the Constitution blew away in the wind with the combined efforts of Woodrow Wilson and his Federal Reserve and IRS, and Harry S Truman entered the Korean War without a Congressional declaration of war.
The was a brief flicker of life under John F. Kennedy, but they shot him and the American people bought the Warren Report hook, line and sinker. There was nothing left to do but start the 4th Reich.
In fact, that is the real 4th being celebrated yesterday. It wasn't the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, but rather the birth of the neo-Nazi 4th Reich. Anyone who thinks otherwise doesn't have their eyes open, whether willfully or out of ignorance. The America of Benjamin Franklin, Henry David Thoreau and Norman Rockwell never existed, but even the dream (hallucination?) died a long time ago. What we see today is the resurrection of something much darker and horrific. It is the continuation of a line in history that keeps popping up like Frankenstein's monster. It refused to die, though it often doesn't quite look like it did the last time it was destroyed.
The 4th Reich looks quite a bit different than the 3rd. The brown shirts are now cops in blue. All the technologies the Nazis were trying desperately to develop are now realities: jet planes, nuclear weapons, mass chemical/biological/radiation weapons. The Gestapo is largely replaced by rooms full of faceless technicians punching buttons and pulling levers on a vast surveillance machine that would have sent Goebbels into ecstatic fits. He could even wipe out entire ethnic groups with tailor-made viruses that would have given him plausible deniability. Think about that question coming up at Nuernberg.
Hell, even Hitler's little toy project, the Volkswagen Beetle, has staged a come-back, and how many Mitsubishis do you see driving down the road next to your BMW or Mercedes?
Yep, the 4th Reich is alive and well, and that is what folks celebrated yesterday. It certainly wasn't American independence. That country hasn't been free or independent for decades now. It was taken over by corporations and secret agencies and hidden systems of finance. The only vestige of that old country is the English language, and that is fading fast, as well.
If the First Reich was the Holy Roman Empire, and the Second was Bismark's United Germany, then Hitler's Third would segue nicely into the American Fourth, since so many Nazis were brought to America after the war, bringing their technology and philosophy, the latter of which was really already strongly rooted in much of America even before WW2. The CIA and NASA were more or less started by Nazis, and those two agencies alone account for much of the rise of the Fourth Reich. In fact, future historians may well see the Third and Fourth Reichs as little more than continuations of the Second.
If you find that a bit startling, then you have to look no further than America's public school system. It is deeply rooted in Prussia, which was, of course, part of the German unification of 1871. The Prussian educational system and philosophy is virtually mirrored by the American public school system and Prussian influence in the US has a long and vital history. The emphasis on sports and 'citizenship' alone is one obvious connection, but there are many that merit deep and protracted study on the part of us arm-chair researchers.
At any rate, I think it's safe to say that the Fourth Reich has arisen in North America and that the sheer number of ties to not only Nazi Germany and Prussia are self-evident, but that the NSA's apparent fixation with spying on Germany would seem to imply quite a bit of ongoing interest in all things German.
Heck, old Ben Franklin himself, besides recommending that the US adopt the turkey as the national bird, also suggested adopting German as the official language in order to sever all ties with English. Perhaps if he had won the argument, things would look quite a bit different today. The Anglo-American Empire would likely not exist and Germany probably would have won WW2...at least more obviously won it, I should say.
If you are American and you are enjoying a bit of "free" time this weekend, you might want to spend a little time investigating the ties and commonalities between the Third and Fourth Reichs, and throw the Prussian educational system in there, while you're at it.
Perhaps you too, will agree that yesterday was the Fourth Reich of July.
Fortunately, I've never been an American. I was born a Texan and never had much truck with those folks north of the border, and we celebrate independence on the 2nd of March. Of course, that was from the tyrannical Mexican government. We are still fighting the US takeover in 1863.
Happy Hot Dogs!