Why the US ruling class mourns John McCain
27 August 2018
There is a well-known saying, of murky Latin origin, that one should not speak ill of the dead. But when the death of an individual becomes the occasion for such universal glorification by the political establishment and the media, as with Senator John McCain of Arizona, a correction is in order. This is especially necessary since the newly deceased had such a lengthy record as a militarist and supporter of political reaction, and the further promotion of such policies is the transparent purpose of the hosannas being sung in his praise.
The Sunday television interview programs on five networks devoted the bulk of their coverage to McCain’s life and career and to fond reminiscences by well-heeled journalists and big-business politicians, Democratic and Republican. “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd noted that McCain was the single most-interviewed person on the program, appearing 73 times in his 36-year political career.
McCain was a right-wing Republican, but the loudest tributes to his political record are coming from Democrats. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer proposed renaming the US Senate’s Russell Office Building. Instead of Richard Russell of Georgia, a Democratic Party defender of Jim Crow segregation, the building would now be named after a Republican defender of wars in Vietnam, Central America, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, etc.
Speaking on ABC’s “This Week,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said, “Right now I'm just heartbroken. I think America’s in tears about the loss of this great man.” Senator Bernie Sanders tweeted, “John McCain was an American hero, a man of decency and honor and a friend of mine. He will be missed not just in the US Senate but by all Americans who respect integrity and independence.”
In yet another characteristic display of lickspittling subservience to the ruling elite, “socialist” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted: “John McCain’s legacy represents an unparalleled example of human decency and American service. As an intern, I learned a lot about the power of humanity in government through his deep friendship with Sen. Kennedy. He meant so much, to so many. My prayers are with his family.”
What does John McCain’s “legacy” consist of? How did he provide “an unparalleled example of human decency and American service”?
McCain spent four years in the House of Representatives and 32 years in the US Senate, but it would be impossible to cite a single piece of legislation with which he was associated that benefited the broad mass of the American people. As far as domestic affairs were concerned, he was best known for voting (in the House) against the bill that established a national holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In the Senate, he was the lone Republican among the “Keating Five,” senators who lobbied federal regulators on behalf of savings and loan swindler Charles Keating in 1987.
The political embarrassment caused by this episode, in which McCain narrowly avoided sanctions by the Senate Ethics Committee, led to his involvement in a decade-long effort to establish at least token limitations on corporate contributions to political campaigns. But the McCain-Feingold bill, as it became known, was ultimately gutted by the Supreme Court, which rejected most limitations on corporate purchasing of legislators as an infringement on “free speech.” Throughout his career, McCain was a reliable vote for the Republican right—for the Gramm-Rudman Act to slash federal social spending, for the impeachment conviction of President Bill Clinton, and for (with a few exceptions) measures to deregulate business and cut taxes for the wealthy.
The overriding feature of McCain’s career, however, was his reflexive hawkishness on foreign policy. He supported war after war, intervention after intervention, always promoting the use of force as the primary feature of American foreign policy, and always advocating the maximum allocation of resources to fuel the Pentagon. In his honor, after his diagnosis with brain cancer made it clear that he was unlikely to survive this year, his Senate colleagues named the 2018 version of the Pentagon budget bill the John McCain National Defense Authorization Act.
McCain’s identification with militarism began with his family background: his father and grandfather were both admirals and now have US Navy warships named after them. McCain graduated from the Naval Academy and became a pilot, leading to his capture in Vietnam and five-and-a-half years of imprisonment. No doubt the circumstances he faced there were very difficult, but any sympathy must be tempered by the fact that he became a POW after dropping bombs on largely defenseless people, making him a front-line participant in one of the greatest war crimes in history, the savage American onslaught on Vietnam.
As the World Socialist Web Site noted in a commentary published after McCain sought to lecture the Vietnamese in 2000 about their political and economic policies:
While McCain gives sermons to the Vietnamese, let us recall that American military forces carried out mass executions, bombed civilians, defoliated half the country, carried out rape and torture, burned villages, shot children, threw prisoners out of helicopters and cut off the ears of people both alive and dead, keeping them as mementos and trading them for cans of beer. Not every soldier perpetrated such crimes individually, of course, but the military intervention as a whole was of a brutal, anti-democratic, imperialist character, which inevitably found expression in such sadistic conduct.
Once freed following the Paris agreement between Washington and Hanoi, McCain came home a “war hero.” After his first marriage ended in divorce in 1980, McCain married Cindy Lou Hensley, the daughter of a multimillionaire beer distributor in Arizona. Now flush with money, McCain moved to Arizona to begin a career in Republican politics. First elected to the House of Representatives in 1982, he backed the US invasion of Grenada in 1983 and the Reagan administration policy of supporting fascist forces in Central America, including death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala and the contra terrorists at war with Nicaragua (he was on the board of the US Council for World Freedom, the American chapter of the World Anti-Communist League, for several years). After succeeding Barry Goldwater in the US Senate in 1986, he backed the first Bush administration’s invasion of Panama in 1989 and the full-scale American war against Iraq in 1990-91, during which hundreds of thousands of Iraqi conscripts were incinerated by American bombs, rockets and shells.
After some initial reluctance, McCain backed the Clinton administration’s military threats in Bosnia, including the bombing of Serb forces, and then in 1999 cheered the full-scale bombing of Serbia, declaring that the United States could accept no limitation on its military operations in support of its aims in Kosovo: “We’re in it, and we have to win it. This means we have to exercise every option.”
Like virtually every other Democrat and Republican, he supported the October 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, launching a war that is now approaching the end of its 17th year, the longest in American history.
It was in the second Iraq War that McCain played his most prominent and reactionary role, cosponsoring the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act, along with Democrat Joe Lieberman, endorsing the bombing of Iraq, first under Clinton and then George W. Bush, cheerleading the 2003 invasion and then pushing for a more aggressive use of force during the protracted US occupation, culminating in Bush’s “surge” of additional troops in 2006-2007.
McCain was a full-throated supporter of whatever lie the Bush administration chose as the basis of its war propaganda: Saddam Hussein’s alleged ties to terrorism; his possession of “weapons of mass destruction”; the desire to establish “democracy” in Iraq; and finally, the need to preserve “stability,” i.e., to deal with the consequences of the US destruction of Iraq as a functioning society.
Along the way, McCain found time to advocate military action against North Korea in 2003, US intervention in Iran in 2007, and US support for Georgia in the war between Russia and that Caucasian republic in 2008 (when he dispatched his wife Cindy to Tbilisi in a show of support).
Finally, in 2008, McCain won the presidential nomination of the Republican Party. Already in ill health, the 71-year-old nominee displayed his “love of country” by selecting the fascistic nitwit, Sarah Palin, as his running mate.
McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign was defeated, in part because of popular hostility to the war in Iraq, with which he was so identified, and partly because of his failure, during the financial crisis of September 2008, to respond as quickly as Obama to the demands of Wall Street for a full-scale federal bailout of the banks.
Throughout the Obama administration, McCain was a firm supporter of the Democratic president when he used military force, as in Libya, or threatened it, as in the South China Sea, and a critic when Obama pulled back, as in Syria. McCain and John Kerry introduced a Senate resolution to sanction the war in Libya, and McCain called for US air power to be used in “a heavier way.” In September 2013, McCain backed a resolution passed by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to give US support to military operations in Syria that would “change the momentum on the battlefield” and strengthen forces opposed to the regime of Bashar al-Assad. He repeatedly called for “more boots on the ground” for the US-backed war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
In October 2016, while the Democratic Party was focusing its presidential campaign on alleged Russian “meddling,” McCain authored an op-ed column published in the Wall Street Journal in which he indicted Russia for having “slaughtered countless civilians” in Syria through “relentless indiscriminate bombing.” There was no little irony in the former bomber of North Vietnam denouncing Russia for doing a tiny fraction of the damage inflicted by the “shock and awe” campaign in Iraq, which led to one million deaths and which McCain supported enthusiastically.
We have noted the embrace of McCain’s legacy by his supposed opponents in the Democratic Party. This is not merely the result of McCain’s support for the bogus allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 US elections, peddled by the Democrats and much of the military-intelligence apparatus. More than a decade ago, in the summer of 2004, there were back-channel discussions between Kerry and McCain, in which the Democratic nominee suggested the formation of a bipartisan presidential ticket, with McCain running as his vice-president, to oppose the reelection of George W. Bush. McCain toyed with the idea, but ultimately decided to remain with the Republicans.
In 2007, when his second campaign to seek the Republican presidential nomination was floundering in its initial stages, McCain was interviewed on the “60 Minutes” program on CBS about the mounting opposition to the war in Iraq. “At what point do you stop doing what you think is right and you start doing what the majority of the American people want?” he was asked. McCain responded, “I disagree with what the majority of the American people want.” The Wall Street Journal hailed this response—which essentially rejected popular sovereignty as the basis of democracy—as “McCain’s Finest Hour.”
It is this absolute commitment to the defense of American imperialism that endeared McCain to the US ruling elite as a whole and explains the outpouring of adulation over the weekend.
Patrick Martin
The canonization of John McCain: Media, political establishment turn warmonger into saint
1 September 2018
“I hated my enemies even before they held me captive because hate sustained me in my devotion to their complete destruction and helped me overcome the virtuous human impulse to recoil in disgust from what had to be done by my hand.”—John McCain on the Vietnam War, April 2001
“However heady the appeal of a call to arms, however just the cause, we should still shed a tear for all that will be lost when war claims its wages from us. Shed a tear, and then get on with the business of killing our enemies as quickly as we can, and as ruthlessly as we must.”—John McCain, October 2001
The American media and political establishment are in the middle of a five-day exercise in moral hypocrisy, cant and myth-making surrounding the death of Republican Senator John McCain. The operation involves nearly every news channel, newspaper publication and politician, Democrat and Republican, following a common script in preparation ever since McCain was diagnosed with brain cancer more than a year ago—John McCain, the “American hero,” the “warrior,” the “maverick,” the likes of which the world may never see again.
On Thursday, a ceremony was held in Arizona featuring speeches by former Vice President Joe Biden and others, concluding with the playing of Frank Sinatra’s, “My Way.” From there, McCain’s body was flown by military aircraft to Washington, where it lay in state in the rotunda of the Capitol building yesterday, a distinction accorded to only 30 other people. McCain’s casket was placed on the wooden catafalque originally built for President Abraham Lincoln after his assassination in 1865—only one of the many political obscenities associated with the affair.
Friday was dedicated to speeches from the assembled congressmen, politicians and military officials. McCain was a “generational leader” (Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell); “one of the bravest souls our nation ever produced” (House Speaker Paul Ryan); one of those “who put country first, who prize service ahead of self, who summon idealism from a cynical age” (Vice President Mike Pence). The attitude of the media was summed up by CNN “journalist” Dana Bash who commented, after it happened to rain as McCain’s coffin was brought up to the US Capitol: “The angels were crying.”
The main memorial service is being held in Washington today, featuring eulogies from former presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, former Secretary of State and war criminal Henry Kissinger and others, before McCain’s body is interned in the ground near the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, on Sunday. Among the pall-bearers in the final scene of the play is actor Warren Beatty, a Democratic supporter and friend of McCain, who will be joined by Biden, ex-Defense Secretary William Cohen, and anti-Putin Russian dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza.
Biden’s speech on Thursday set the tone for what has followed. “My name is Joe Biden,” he began, “I’m a Democrat. And I loved John McCain.” He regarded McCain as “a brother,” Biden said, and while they had “a lot of family fights,” these differences were overshadowed by what they had in common. Biden, vice president for Obama, who defeated McCain in the 2008 elections, was echoing the comments of Obama himself on the 2016 elections—an “intramural scrimmage” between two sides on the same team.
“John’s story is an American story,” Biden declared, “It’s the American story, grounded in respect and decency, basic fairness, the intolerance through the abuse of power. Many of you travel the world, look how the rest of the world looks at us. They look at us as a little naïve, so fair, so decent. We are the naïve Americans. That’s who we are. That’s who John was.”
What can one say about such absurdities? The American government and its military are despised the world over, responsible for inflicting death and destruction in countless countries—Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Palestine and many more. This “so decent” government declares the right to kill anyone, invade any country, overthrow any government that gets in its way. The modus operandi of this “so fair” ruling class is that of bullying, threats and violence.
It is with the unbridled use of military force that McCain is most closely associated. He was among the most vociferous and earliest backers of the 2003 Iraq war, the Obama administration’s war against Libya and the CIA-backed operation in Syria. In support of the latter, he infamously traveled to Syria and met with the Islamic fundamentalist organizations spearheading the civil war. He was a strident advocate of aggression against Iran and an adamant opponent of any restriction on the gargantuan US military budget.
The coordinated and choreographed response to McCain’s death is determined by definite political considerations. There is, first, the factional conflict within the ruling class, pitting dominant sections of the military-intelligence apparatus against the Trump administration. McCain has played a central role, in alliance with the Democratic Party, in the anti-Russia campaign, aimed at enforcing a more aggressive foreign policy in Syria and against Russia itself. In the media, much has been made of McCain’s detailed instructions for his final sendoff from this world, which he reportedly worked on for months, including the demand that Trump not participate.
The Democrats—from Biden and Obama to “left” representatives like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—have seized the opportunity to associate themselves with a figure who throughout his life maintained the closest ties to the military. Always eager to declare their fidelity to this apparatus of violence, the Democrats have elevated McCain, along with former CIA Director John Brennan, into their political pantheon, the better to conduct their opposition to Trump on the most right-wing basis possible.
More fundamentally, the response to the death of McCain is yet another milestone in the rehabilitation of the Vietnam War. From the first days of the Reagan administration, the overcoming of the “Vietnam Syndrome,” i.e., mass popular hostility to military interventions, has been a political imperative of the ruling class. It was George H.W. Bush who, at the end of the first Iraq war in 1991, prematurely declared, “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.”
The effort to develop a new political psychology to justify permanent and unending war requires a falsification of history. In all the hosannas to McCain’s “heroism” in Vietnam, there is not an ounce of critical comment on the character of the war, a barbaric imperialist intervention that killed three million Vietnamese and nearly 60,000 American soldiers. In the ten years between 1961 and 1971, the US military carried out countless atrocities and dumped more than 20 million gallons of toxic chemicals in Indochina, turning a third of Vietnam into a wasteland.
McCain himself was more honest about the nature of the war when he reflected on the experience in 2001. The first quote cited above is from a comment written in April of that year defending former Senator Bob Kerrey after the latter admitted to participating in a death squad attack on the tiny Mekong Delta hamlet of Thanh Phong, in which he and six soldiers under his command killed 21 women, children and elderly men.
Under the headline, “Bob Kerrey, War Hero,” McCain’s defense was an unvarnished justification for war crimes. Much has been made of the fact that McCain came to favor reconciliation with Vietnam and better relations with the country, bound up with the US conflict with China. However, nothing in his statements suggests that he ever regretted the role of the United States in the war. On the contrary. The second quote above, from a Wall Street Journalcolumn written by McCain in October of the same year (“There is no substitute for victory”) makes clear that he saw the brutal and systematic violence carried out in Vietnam as the model for the “wars of the 21st century.”
The effort to end the “Vietnam Syndrome” has entailed not only the falsification of history, but the elevation of the place of the military in the political life of the country. The deification of McCain, the military-state man, the “hero warrior,” is part of this. Until the 1990s, soldiers were not referred to as “warriors.” Most veterans of World War I and II, not to mention Korea, did not want to talk about their war experiences, and certainly did not want to put on a military uniform.
Today, the military, along with the intelligence agencies, exercises an ever more dominant role over all American life. The military is embedded in the media, and the media is embedded in it. Politicians, Democrats as much if not more than Republicans, cite their military and intelligence backgrounds as their most important qualifications for office. The universal glorification of the military expresses the hollowing out of American bourgeois democracy under the impact of unsustainable levels of social inequality, a political radicalization among workers and youth, and a deep and abiding fear on the part of the ruling class that its project of imperialist conquest and social counter-revolution will encounter mass resistance.
One final point on the canonization of John McCain. Perhaps the defining feature of the whole operation is its hollowness, its artificial character, its disconnect from the concerns and thoughts of the vast majority of the population. No matter how hard they try to elevate McCain into a political and moral giant, most people don’t give a damn about his death. McCain is as dead as a doornail, and he will rapidly fade from popular consciousness. The first anniversary of his death, and all those that follow, will pass unnoticed.
Joseph Kishore
Obama Funds the Mexican Fascist Party of LA RAZA
“The Race”
by Michelle Malkin
Only in America could critics of a group called
"The Race" be labeled racists. Such is the triumph of left-wing
identity chauvinists, whose aggressive activists and supine abettors have
succeeded in redefining all opposition as "hate."
Both Barack Obama and John McCain will speak this
week in San Diego at the annual conference of the National Council of La Raza,
the Latino organization whose name is Spanish for, yes, "The Race."
Can you imagine Obama and McCain paying homage to a group of white people who
called themselves that? No matter. The presidential candidates and the media
have legitimized "The Race" as a mainstream ethnic lobbying group and
marginalized its critics as intolerant bigots. The unvarnished truth is that
the group is a radical ethnic nationalist outfit that abuses your tax dollars
and milks PC politics to undermine our sovereignty.
Here
are 15 things you should know about "The Race":
15. "The Race" supports driver's licenses
for illegal aliens.
14."The Race" demands in-state tuition
discounts for illegal alien students that are not available to law-abiding U.S.
citizens and law-abiding legal immigrants.
13. "The Race" vehemently opposes
cooperative immigration enforcement efforts between local, state and federal
authorities.
12. "The Race" opposes a secure fence on
the southern border.
11. "The Race" joined the American-Arab
Anti-Discrimination Committee in a failed lawsuit attempt to prevent the feds
from entering immigration information into a key national crime database -- and
to prevent local police officers from accessing the data.
10. "The Race" opposed the state of
Oklahoma's tough immigration-enforcement-first laws, which cut off welfare to
illegal aliens, put teeth in employer sanctions and strengthened local-federal
cooperation and information sharing.
9. "The Race" joined other open-borders,
anti-assimilationists and sued to prevent Proposition 227, California's
bilingual education reform ballot initiative, from becoming law.
8. "The Race" bitterly protested
common-sense voter ID provisions as an "absolute disgrace."
7. "The Race" has consistently opposed
post-9/11 national security measures at every turn.
6. Former "Race" president Raul
Yzaguirre, Hillary Clinton's Hispanic outreach adviser, said this: "U.S.
English is to Hispanics as the Ku Klux Klan is to blacks." He was
referring to U.S. English, the nation's oldest, largest citizens' action group
dedicated to preserving the unifying role of the English language in the United
States. "The Race" also pioneered Orwellian open-borders Newspeak and
advised the Mexican government on how to lobby for illegal alien amnesty while
avoiding the terms "illegal" and "amnesty."
5. "The Race" gives mainstream cover to a
poisonous subset of ideological satellites, led by Movimiento Estudiantil
Chicano de Aztlan, or Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan (MEChA). The late GOP
Rep. Charlie Norwood rightly characterized the organization as "a radical
racist group … one of the most anti-American groups in the country, which has
permeated U.S. campuses since the 1960s, and continues its push to carve a
racist nation out of the American West."
4. "The Race" is currently leading a
smear campaign against staunch immigration enforcement leaders and has called
for TV and cable news networks to keep immigration enforcement proponents off
the airwaves -- in addition to pushing for Fairness Doctrine policies to shut
up their foes. The New York Times reported that current "Race"
president Janet Murguia believes "hate speech" should "not be
tolerated, even if such censorship were a violation of First Amendment
rights."
3. "The Race" sponsors militant ethnic
nationalist charter schools subsidized by your public tax dollars (at least $8
million in federal education grants). The schools include Aztlan Academy in
Tucson, Ariz., the Mexicayotl Academy in Nogales, Ariz., Academia Cesar Chavez
Charter School in St. Paul, Minn., and La Academia Semillas del Pueblo in Los
Angeles, whose principal inveighed: "We don't want to drink from a White
water fountain, we have our own wells and our natural reservoirs and our way of
collecting rain in our aqueducts. We don't need a White water fountain …
ultimately the White way, the American way, the neo liberal, capitalist way of
life will eventually lead to our own destruction."
2. "The Race" has perfected the art of
the PC shakedown at taxpayer expense, pushing relentlessly to lower home loan
standards for Hispanic borrowers, reaping millions in federal "mortgage
counseling" grants, seeking special multimillion-dollar earmarks and
partnering with banks that do business with illegal aliens.
1. "The Race" thrives on ethnic supremacy
-- and the elite sheeple's unwillingness to call it what it is. As historian
Victor Davis Hanson observes: "[The] organization's very nomenclature 'The
National Council of La Raza' is hate speech to the core. Despite all the
contortions of the group, Raza (as its Latin cognate suggests) reflects the
meaning of 'race' in Spanish, not 'the people' -- and that's precisely why we
don't hear of something like 'The National Council of the People,' which would
not confer the buzz notion of ethnic, racial and tribal chauvinism."
The
fringe is the center. The center is the fringe. Viva La Raza.
*
ALIEN
NATION: Secrets of the Invasion
May
2006 – ALIEN NATION: Secrets of the Invasion – Why America's government invites
rampant illegal immigration
It's
widely regarded as America's biggest problem: Between 12 and 20 million aliens
(MOST SOURCES SUGGEST THERE ARE MUCH MORE LIKELY NEARLY 40 MILLION ILLEGALS
HERE NOW) – including large numbers of criminals, gang members and even
terrorists – have entered this nation illegally, with countless more streaming
across our scandalously unguarded borders daily.
The
issue polarizes the nation, robs citizens of jobs, bleeds taxpayers, threatens
America's national security and dangerously balkanizes the country into unassimilated
ethnic groups with little loyalty or love for America's founding values.
Indeed, the de facto invasion is rapidly transforming America into a totally
different country than the one past generations have known and loved.
And
yet – most Americans have almost no idea what is really going on, or why it is
happening.
While
news reports depict demonstrations and debates, and while politicians promise
"comprehensive border security programs," no real answers ever seem
to emerge.
But
there are answers. Truthful answers. Shocking answers.
In
its groundbreaking May edition, WND's acclaimed monthly Whistleblower magazine
reveals the astounding hidden agendas, plans and people behind America's
immigration nightmare.
Titled
"ALIEN NATION," the issue is subtitled "SECRETS OF THE INVASION:
Why government invites rampant illegal immigration." Indeed, it reveals
pivotal secrets very few Americans know. For example:
Did
you know that the powerfully influential Council on Foreign Relations – often
described as a “shadow government" – issued a comprehensive report last
year laying out a five-year plan for the "establishment by 2010 of a North
American economic and security community" with a common "outer
security perimeter"?
Roughly
translated: In the next few years, according to the 59-page report titled
"Building a North American Community," the U.S. must be integrated
with the socialism, corruption, poverty and population of Mexico and Canada.
"Common perimeter" means wide-open U.S. borders between the U.S.,
Mexico and Canada. As Phyllis Schlafly reveals in this issue of Whistleblower:
"This CFR document asserts that President Bush, Mexican President Vicente
Fox and Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin 'committed their governments' to
this goal when they met at Bush's ranch and at Waco, Texas, on March 23, 2005.
The three adopted the 'Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America'
and assigned 'working groups' to fill in the details. It was at this same
meeting, grandly called the North American Summit, that President Bush pinned
the epithet 'vigilantes' on the volunteers guarding our border in
Arizona."
The
CFR report – important excerpts of which are published in Whistleblower – also
suggests North American elitists begin getting together regularly, and presumably
secretly, "to buttress North American relationships, along the lines of
the Bilderberg or Wehrkunde conferences, organized to support transatlantic
relations." The Bilderberg and Wehrkunde conferences are highly secret
conclaves of the powerful. For decades, there have been suspicions that such
meetings were used for plotting the course of world events and especially the
centralization of global decision-making.
Did
you know that radical immigrant groups – including the League of United Latin
American Citizens (LULAC), the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational
Fund (MALDEF), the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan (MEChA) and the
National Council of La Raza (La Raza) – not only share a revolutionary agenda
of conquering America's southwest, but they also share common funding sources,
notably the Ford and Rockefeller foundations?
''California
is going to be a Hispanic state," said Mario Obeldo, former head of
MALDEF. "Anyone who does not like it should leave." And MEChA's goal
is even more radical: an independent ''Aztlan,'' the collective name this
organization gives to the seven states of the U.S. Southwest – Arizona,
California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas and Utah. So why would the
Rockefeller and Ford foundations support such groups? Joseph Farah tells the
story in this issue of Whistleblower.
Why
have America's politicians – of both major parties – allowed the illegal alien
invasion of this nation to continue for the last 30 years unabated? With
al-Qaida and allied terrorists promising to annihilate major U.S. cities with
nuclear weapons, with some big-city hospital emergency rooms near closure due
to the crush of so many illegals, with the rapid spread throughout the U.S. of
MS-13, the super-violent illegal alien gang – with all this and more, why do
U.S. officials choose to ignore the laws of the land and the will of the people
to pursue, instead, policies of open borders and lax immigration enforcement?
The
answers to all this and much more are in Whistleblower's "ALIEN NATION"
issue.
Is
there hope? Or is America lost to a demographic invasion destined to annihilate
its traditional Judeo-Christian culture, and to the ever-growing likelihood
that nuclear-armed jihadists will cross our porous borders and wreak
unthinkable destruction here?
There
most definitely is hope, according to this issue of Whistleblower. Although
most politicians of both major political parties have long since abdicated
their responsibility for securing America's borders and dealing effectively
with the millions already here illegally, there are a few exceptions – most
notably Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo.
May's
Whistleblower includes an exclusive sneak preview of Tancredo's forthcoming
blockbuster book, "In Mortal Danger: The Battle for America’s Border and
Security." In an extended excerpt, Whistleblower presents Tencredo's
expert and inspired analysis of exactly how to solve the nation's most vexing
problem.
*
THE
AZTLAN INVASION & THE LA RAZA FASCIST PARTY FOR MEXICAN SUPREMACY
“The
radicals seek nothing less than secession from the United States whether to
form their own sovereign state or to reunify with Mexico. Those who desire
reunification with Mexico are irredentists who seek to reclaim Mexico's
"lost" territories in the American Southwest.”
MULTICULTURALISM,
IMMIGRATION AND AZTLAN
By
Maria Hsia Chang Professor of Political Science, University of Nevada Reno
One
of the standard arguments invoked by those in favor of massive immigration into
the United States is that our country is founded on immigrants who have always
been successfully assimilated into America's mainstream culture and society. As
one commentator put it, "Assimilation evokes the misty past of Ellis
Island, through which millions entered, eventually seeing their descendants
become as American as George Washington."1 Nothing more vividly testifies
against that romantic faith in America's ability to continuously assimilate new
members than the events of October 16, 1994 in Los Angeles. On that day, 70,000
people marched beneath "a sea of Mexican flags" protesting
Proposition 187, a referendum measure that would deny many state benefits to
illegal immigrants and their children. Two weeks later, more protestors marched
down the street, this time carrying an American flag upside down. Both protests
point to a disturbing and rising phenomenon of Chicano separatism in the United
States — the product of a complex of forces, among which are multiculturalism
and a generous immigration policy combined with a lax border control. The
Problem Chicanos refer to "people of Mexican descent in the United
States" or "Mexican Americans in general." Today, there are
reasons to believe that Chicanos as a group are unlike previous immigrants in
that they are more likely to remain unassimilated and unintegrated, whether by
choice or circumstance — resulting in the formation of a separate quasi-nation
within the United States. More than that, there are Chicano political activists
who intend to marry cultural separateness with territorial and political self-determination.
The more moderate among them aspire to the cultural and political autonomy of
"home rule". The radicals seek nothing less than secession from the
United States whether to form their own sovereign state or to reunify with
Mexico. Those who desire reunification with Mexico are irredentists who seek to
reclaim Mexico's "lost" territories in the American Southwest.
Whatever
their goals, what animates all of them is the dream of Aztlan. According to
legend, Aztlan was the ancestral homeland of the Aztecs which they left in
journeying southward to found Tenochtitlan, the center of their new
civilization, which is today's Mexico City. Today, the "Nation of
Aztlan" refers to the American southwestern states of California, Arizona,
Texas, New Mexico, portions of Nevada, Utah, Colorado, which Chicano
nationalists claim were stolen by the United States and must be reconquered
(Reconquista) and reclaimed for Mexico. The myth of Aztlan was revived by
Chicano political activists in the 1960s as a central symbol of Chicano
nationalist ideology. In 1969, at the Chicano National Liberation Youth
Conference in Denver, Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales put forth a political
document entitled El Plan de Aztlan (Spiritual Plan of Aztlan). The Plan is a
clarion call to Mexican-Americans to form a separate Chicano nation: In the
spirit of a new people that is conscious not only of its proud historial
heritage, but also of the brutal "gringo" invasion of our
territories, we, the Chicano inhabitants and civilizers of the nothern land of
Aztlan from whence came our forefathers ...declare that the call of our blood
is...our inevitable destiny.... Aztlan belongs to those who plant the seeds,
water the fields, and gather the crops, and not to the foreign Europeans. We do
not recognize capricious frontiers on the bronze continent.... Brotherhood
unites us, and love for our brothers makes us a people whose time has come ....
With our heart in our hands and our hands in the soil, we declare the
independence of our mestizo nation. We are a bronze people with a bronze
culture. Before the world, before all of North America, before all our brothers
in the bronze continent, we are a nation, we are a union of free pueblos, we
are Aztlan.
How
Chicanos are Unlike Previous Immigrants Brent A. Nelson, writing in 1994,
observed that in the 1980s America's Southwest had begun to be transformed into
"a de facto nation" with its own culture, history, myth, geography,
religion, education, and language. Whatever evidence there is indicates that
Chicanos, as a group, are unlike previous waves of immigrants into the United
States. In the first place, many Chicanos do not consider themselves immigrants
at all because their people "have been here for 450 years" before the
English, French, or Dutch. Before California and the Southwest were seized by
the United States, they were the lands of Spain and Mexico. As late as 1780 the
Spanish crown laid claim to territories from Florida to California, and on the
far side of the Mississippi up to the Great Lakes and the Rockies. Mexico held
title to much of Spanish possessions in the United States until the Treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican-American war in 1848. As a consequence,
Mexicans "never accepted the borders drawn up by the 1848 treaty."
That
history has created among Chicanos a feeling of resentment for being "a
conquered people," made part of the United States against their will and
by the force of arms. Their resentment is amply expressed by Voz Fronteriza, a
Chicano student publication,
which
referred to Border Patrol officers killed in the line of duty as "pigs
(migra)" trying to defend "the false frontier."
Chicanos
are also distinct from other immigrant groups because of the geographic
proximity of their native country. Their physical proximity to Mexico gives
Chicanos "the option of life in both Americas, in two places and in two
cultures, something earlier immigrants never had." Geographic proximity
and ease of transportation are augmented by the media. Radio and television
keep the spoken language alive and current so that Spanish, unlike the native
languages of previous immigrants into the United States, "shows no sign of
fading."
A
result of all that is the failure by Chicanos to be fully assimilated into the
larger American society and culture. As Earl Shorris, author of Latinos: A
Biography of the People, observed: "Latinos have been more resistant to
the melting pot than any other group. Their entry en masse into the United
States will test the limits of the American experiment...." The continuous
influx of Mexican immigrants into the United States serve to continuously renew
Chicano culture so that their sense of separateness will probably continue
"far into the future...." There are other reasons for the failure of
Chicano assimilation. Historically, a powerful force for assimilation was
upward social mobility: Immigrants into the United States became assimilated as
they rose in educational achievement and income. But today's post-industrial
American economy, with its narrower paths to upward mobility, is making it more
difficult for certain groups to improve their socioeconomic circumstances.
Unionized factory jobs, which once provided a step up for the second generation
of past waves of immigrants, have been disappearing for decades. Instead of the
diamond-shaped economy of industrial America, the modern American economy is
shaped like an hourglass. There is a good number of jobs for unskilled people
at the bottom, a fair number of jobs for the highly educated at the top, but
comparatively few jobs for those in the middle without a college education or
special skills. To illustrate, a RAND Corporation study forecasts that 85
percent of California's new jobs will require post-secondary education. For a
variety of reasons, the nationwide high-school dropout rate for Hispanics (the
majority of whom are Chicano) is 30 percent — three times the rate for whites
and twice the rate for blacks. Paradoxically, the dropout rate for Hispanics
born in the United States is even higher than for young immigrants. Among
Chicanos, high-school dropout rates actually rise between the second and third
generations. Their low educational achievement accounts for why Chicanos as a
group are poor despite being hardworking. In 1996, for the first time, Hispanic
poverty rate began to exceed that of American blacks. In 1995, household income
rose for every ethnic group except Hispanics, for whom it dropped 5 percent.
Latinos now make up a quarter of the nation's poor people, and are more than
three times as likely to be impoverished than whites. This decline in income
has taken place despite high rates of labor-force participation by Latino men,
and despite an emerging Latino middle class. In California, where Latinos now
approach one-third of the population, their education levels are far lower than
those of other immigrants, and they earn about half of what native-born
Californians earn. This means that, for the first time in the history of
American immigration, hard work is not leading to economic advancement because
immigrants in service jobs face unrelenting labor-market pressure from more
recently arrived immigrants who are eager to work for less. The narrowing of
the pathways of upward mobility has implications for the children of recent
Mexican immigrants. Their ascent into the middle-class mainstream will likely
be blocked and they will join children of earlier black and Puerto Rican
migrants as part of an expanded multiethnic underclass. Whereas first
generation immigrants compare their circumstances to the Mexico that they left
— and thereby feel immeasurably better off — their children and grandchildren
will compare themelves to other U.S. groups. Given their lower educational
achievement and income, that comparison will only lead to feelings of relative
deprivation and resentment. They are unlikely to be content as maids,
gardeners, or fruit pickers. Many young Latinos in the second and third
generations see themselves as locked in irremediable conflict with white
society, and are quick to deride successful Chicano students as
"wannabes." For them, to study hard is to "act white" and
exhibit group disloyalty. That attitude is part of the Chicano culture of
resistance — a culture that actively resists assimilation into mainstream
America. That culture is created, reinforced, and maintained by radical Chicano
intellectuals, politicians, and the many Chicano Studies programs in U.S.
colleges and universities. As examples, according to its editor, Elizabeth
Martinez, the purpose of Five Hundred Years of Chicano History, a book used in
over 300 schools throughout the West, is to "celebrate our resistance to
being colonized and absorbed by racist empire builders." The book calls
the INS and the Border Patrol "the Gestapo for Mexicans."
For
Rodolfo Acuna, author of Occupied America: The Chicano's Struggle Toward
Liberation, probably the most widely assigned text in U.S. Chicano Studies
programs, the Anglo-American invasion of Mexico was "as vicious as that of
Hitler's invasion of Poland and other Central European nations...." The
book also includes a map showing "the Mexican republic" in 1822
reaching up into Kansas and Oklahoma, and including within it Utah, Nevada, and
everything west and south of there
"This
is country belongs to Mexico" is said by the Mexican Militant. This is a
common teaching that the U.S. is really AZTLAN, belonging to Mexicans, which is
taught to Mexican kids in Arizona and California through a LA Raza educational
program funded by American Tax Payers via President Obama, when he gave LA RAZA
$800,000.00 in March of 2009!
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