I had a couple of my posts taken down by Keith Redmond at the American Expatriates Facebook Group.

The first made use of Lebron James comment, ‘I’m the best player in the world’.

I wrote, “Mirror Mirror on the wall, who is the best basketball player of them all?” Keith Redmond, the co-administrator of the Facebook group asked me what relevance it had to the group and I said it is analogous to American exceptionalism, “Mirror, Mirror on the wall, who is the most exceptional of them all?” It is really about the National Narcissistic Personality Disorder from which Americans suffer as a nation. It leads to the USA unilaterally imposing FATCA on the rest of the world as so beautifully captured in this video, which is still the best explanation of FATCA ever:

The second censored post reported on the State Department’s denunciation of Dominican Republic citing the United Nations human rights provisions. I said the USA was hypocritical because it violates the human rights of its own expats. 

Then as Deedee Gierow, the Democrats Abroad co-administrator of the American Expatriates Facebook group, posted that she was sick and tired of all the bashing of the USA and that she, Keith and others were working very hard to lobby Washington (Facebook link). This solicited a discussion in which Redmond and Gierow heroically defended the purpose of the group and that they would henceforth delete any America-bashing content.

The American Expatriates group’s mission is to inform, educate, and provide the most up to date information regarding United States government policies affecting the lives of Americans living overseas. It is extremely important to mitigate the misconceptions about Americans living outside the United States vis-à-vis the public at large

It remains unclear to me how it is possible to have a group which discusses Citizenship Based Taxation and FATCA  from an expat’s perspective without being anti-American. This is the conundrum–either the content is irrelevant (e.g., cookie recipes) or it is anti-American–e.g., discussions of the lives that are being ruined by FATCA and CBT. How do you stand by and allow innocent people to be destroyed by a foreign government and say positive things about that government?

There was some back and forth between myself and some of the other active members of the group, in which I learned that I am argumentative and offensive. Really? That really surprised me.

My third censored post was a comment: if we can’t really complain about how the USA is treating us, then we are supposed to be like a battered spouse, who quietly accepts abuse, and so I posted a link to the following page and suggested the situation was comparable to spousal abuse: Intimate Partner Violence Dynamics.

It seemed like Expat Forum deja vu, when I concluded that a censored forum is an oxymoron. So later when I suggested that some people would indeed leave the group because it wasn’t a safe place anymore, Redmond told me to leave. So I suppose my days are numbered.

I guess that is all I can write for now. My knee is bothering me and it is hard to stand up at my desk. In any case, it is good that some people are trying to lobby the US government, but I have no faith that that will change anything. So perhaps my cynicism and pessimism is not welcome in best of all worlds–but certainly not on certain “forums”. Cheers to you all.